COMIC SEED!

» see comicseed.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Penguin Shobo declared bankruptcy on 28 October 2005. It was a small Tokyo publisher and the collapse put most of its books out of print, which is the ordinary end of that story. The unusual part is what turned up in the accounts: the web comic magazine the company had been giving away free since September 2002 was the division in the black.

COMIC SEED! opened on 20 September 2002 as a monthly, delivered through the browser and paid for entirely by advertising. There was no membership tier and no charge for anything. Back numbers stayed readable two issues deep, and each issue was up until the 14th of the following month.

The site went dark with the bankruptcy that November. In March 2006 Futabasha announced it was picking the title up, and was specific about the wording: not a revival of Penguin Shobo's magazine but a new launch under the same name. The editorial staff of Futabasha's print title Comic High! ran it alongside their own book. It came back on 28 April 2006 and lasted another two years and two months.

~ the record ~

~ nothing to install ~

Most Japanese digital comic services of that decade made you install a proprietary reader first, and some of those readers only ran on Windows. COMIC SEED! did not. The comics were in the page you were already looking at, and the Japanese article makes a point of saying so, because in 2002 that was the feature.

The one concession to the sales side was an advertisement. The in-page viewer played a commercial for Comic High!, the paper magazine, every time it opened. That stopped with the September 2006 issue and nothing took its place.

~ tsugumomo ~

Yoshikazu Hamada started Tsugumomo here in 2007 and carried it over to WEB Comic High! when this closed, then to Futabasha's Monthly Action after that. A television anime followed in 2017 and a second season in 2020. Its only English release came out through JManga, which is itself a grave on this site, so the series has now outlived two of the platforms that carried it.

~ what the receivers nearly lost ~

Penguin Shobo also had a print imprint attached to the magazine, SEED! COMiCS, and some of what sat in it was worth more than the company was. Natsume Ono published LA QUINTA CAMERA and not simple under that label before she was Natsume Ono, and both books had to be reissued by Shogakukan once the imprint stopped existing. Futabasha started its own line, ACTION COMICS SEED!, in January 2007.

Comic High! itself, the paper magazine that lent COMIC SEED! its editors and its commercials, printed its last issue in May 2015. The web spin-off had been dead for seven years by then.

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